


little bird

by ElisAttack



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bucky makes more pottery than any human needs, Cabin Fic, Identity Issues, M/M, Steve and Bucky take a page from the Hulk’s book, Steve tries to domesticate space chickens, and launch themselves into space, and memory’s a funny thing, more like a starting over on a uninhabited planet fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-23
Updated: 2018-09-23
Packaged: 2019-07-16 05:21:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16079288
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElisAttack/pseuds/ElisAttack
Summary: To say that Steve is a man easily distracted, is to do him a disservice.  When he focuses on something, he does so with all his attention.  Rather, he is a man whose priorities can change with the flip of a switch.This isn’t something Bucky remembers from before.  This is something the soldier knows now.Or the one where Steve and Bucky leave earth at the end of Civil War.





	little bird

**Author's Note:**

> All I can say is that this was written in the middle of the night, on a Greyhound bus somewhere in a creepy, forested/mountainous area of New York state, and it shows.

 

The rain falls relentless.  Slips from the sky like a prayer, slides down the canopy, trails down their thatched roof, right into Steve’s abandoned mug.

To say that Steve is a man easily distracted, is to do him a disservice.  When he focuses on something, he does it with all his attention. Rather, he is a man whose priorities can change with the flip of a switch.

This isn’t something Bucky remembers from before.  This is something the soldier knows now.

The mug is chipped in some places, and a large crack extends from the lip all the way to the bottom, bisecting a shield left behind in Siberia.  Seven years on this planet, and it’s the only one left. He scoops it up, but the drink is lost; watered down, and crawling with insects caught in the downpour.  He empties it out over the side of the veranda, then squints out to the treeline, hoping to spot Steve. He is nowhere to be found.

The soldier returns the mug to its spot on the shelves.  Placing it beside a plate made from clay dug at the riverside.  He rubs a thumb over the green glaze of a cup, spiderwebbed with fine cracks.  Next to it, a yellow-tinted bowl he pulled from the kiln last week. The colour shifts, depending on the percentage of iron oxide in the glaze.  It’s impossible to know how it will turn out until after it is fired.

The soldier sinks his fingers into the thick beard covering his jaw, and decides he needs a shave.

He sets a shallow stoneware basin out in the yard, letting it fill with rainwater.  Fetching the lard soap, and the knife, he arranges them in front of the mirror tied to a veranda post.  The soap doesn’t lather, but it’s slippery enough to get the deed done. Quick, practiced swipes over his face, stretching his skin by sucking his cheeks in, and the hair he washes off the knife is still brown.  

As brown, as it was the day they tumbled from the sky.

The rain lets up as he rinses the leftover soap from his face, and the sweat from the back of his neck.  The humidity always gets to him during the rainy season. Twin stars peek from the cloud cover, and the soldier hops down from the veranda.  The thick grass beneath his sandals acts as a barrier between the mud, but it still squelches as he walks.

The land stinks of vegetation, dirt, and water.  The plants are strange, and the jungle is old. Steve says it is prehistoric, but how can it be prehistoric if they are alive right now?

Still, there’s still no sign of Steve.

The soldier checks on the storehouse.  Making sure the roof is still intact. Running his hand over the daub walls.  Confirming that the stilts lifting it from the ground have not yet rotted. The lime plaster could use a touch up in a few places, but otherwise it’s fine.

The soldier finds Steve in a clearing on the other side of the house.  He sits on a stump, bent over a mess of reeds and fibre rope, soaked to the bone.  His hair is long to his nape, and tangled, like he recently roamed the jungle. A leaf pokes from the crown of his head.  The soldier plucks it out.

“Bucky,”  Steve says, squinting up at him.  A streak of mud is smeared across his forehead.  The soldier licks his thumb and rubs it clean. Steve blinks, a red flush settling on his cheeks.  “It’s almost ready.”

“What is?”

“The cage,”  Steve says excitedly, brandishing about the mess in his arms.

“Hmm,”  the soldier says, just noticing one of his bowls at Steve’s feet.  Cushioned with grass, and half covered with moss—three green eggs with purple spots rest within.  They’re about the same size as a duck egg. “Again?”

Steve scratches the back of his neck.  “This one seems nicer.”

“Less likely to bite, you mean.”

***

The eggs come home with them.  Steve sets the lopsided cage where residual heat from the fire will keep whatever hatches warm and dry.  For now, the bowl sits right on the edge of the fire pit.

Sometimes, the soldier wakes in the middle of the night, stirred by Steve’s prodding steps.  He couches in front of the fire, stirring the embers. The soldier cracks one eyes open, watching.  Steve runs his fingers over the lip of the bowl the soldier crafted using his flesh and blood hand. Dirt beneath his fingernails.  Firelight dancing in his eyes. He holds an egg up to the light, and a heart beats within.

A watched pot never boils, and watched eggs never hatch.  But in Steve’s case, the birds hatch a mere ten days later.  They’re ugly things. Shrieking, pink, featherless flesh. Small tufts on their crowns.  Orange beaks perpetually open. They are hungry things.

***

The soldier examines the stalks of grain growing from the flooded banks, as Steve waves a piece of netting around, trying to catch the big flies that hover above the stinking mud.  Food for his birds.

The soldier watches, amused, as Steve slips on clay, landing on his ass in the shallow water.  He looks so startled, wide-eyed, open-mouthed, the soldier lets out a little laugh. He wades over to Steve, and offers a helping hand.  Steve wraps his muddy, calloused palm around the soldier’s wrist, and pulls himself to his feet.

“Careful,”  the soldier warns,  “Or one day you’ll fall face first—”

Steve kisses him, pushing him back a step with the intensity of it.  Almost immediately Steve breaks it with a gasp, and a rushed, “I’m so sorry, I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“You know exactly what you were thinking, you always do,”  the soldier says calmly, not in accustion. It’s a pure statement of fact.

“I…”  Steve trails off.  He licks his lips, a horrible kind of hope in his eyes.  “How do you know that?”

“Seven years, Steve.”  The soldier drops his arm, suddenly cold as ice.  “It’s been seven years of you and me together on this planet.”

 _And still you want the man I was before_.

That night, after the birds have been fed, Steve slips into the bedroll beside the soldier’s.  He lies on his back, arms folded on his stomach, blinking up at the rafters. The soldier turns on his side, arm tucked under his head, watching.

“You’re my best friend,”  Steve says to the rafters.  To the earthenware crocks filled with grain, preserved meat, fruit, and salt stored above.

“And you are mine,”  the soldier answers. Seven years.

“I miss you,”  Steve’s voice cracks.

“I’m here,”  he says, but a bird chirps, and Steve rises.  The dead flies sit on a dish glazed the colour of the flowing river.  He picks one with a pair of tweezers, and drops it into a bird’s mouth.

***

The soldier sits on the edge of the veranda, a lump of wedged clay on the kick wheel in front of him.  It’s a simple thing, an axel and two flat disks, bolted deep into the earth.

He kicks with his left leg, so he doesn’t over balance.  Dipping his hand in water drawn from the river, he shapes the clay.  He pushes into it with the weight of his body, using his thumb to open it up, he draws it down flat into a plate.  Finally, he smooths the surface with a piece of wood. With one end of a wire held in his teeth, he slices the plate from the wheel.

He takes it to the storehouse, and sets it on the shelves beside at least a hundred other pieces, some already biscuit fired, some still waiting.  It will dry for a few days, then he’ll put it back on the wheel to shape the foot.

Steve never says anything about the storehouse, even though the soldier makes more pottery than they will ever use.

***

The Soviets never taught the soldier how to build a house.

They taught him how to kill, how to listen, and how to see.  They sent him to Korea, and then they sent him to Vietnam to further their interests.  There he killed, he listened, and he saw. The Soviets let him keep his memories of those wars.  A reward of sorts.

He happened to be very good at furthering their interests.

In Korea he sat in rafters with his gun, and watched craftsmen make stoneware.  Watched apprentices wedge clay until their skin stained red to the elbow, and their arms grew wiry with muscle.  Watched men carve delicate cranes into solid clay. Listened to the masters maintain the kilns, sweeping up the wood ash to make glazes.  The rhythmic slap of a paddle through smooth slip. He killed their enemies when the tanks finally arrived.

In Vietnam the Americans burned hatch roof huts, and rice stores.  The soldier watched villages raze, then watched villagers rebuild. He listened to their work songs as they stored new bags of rice.  He killed the Americans when they returned with their cigarettes and lighter fluid.

He remembers how to use a gun.  But they ran out of bullets years ago.  They carved out their few miles of jungle territory in the blood of predators eager to attack.  Built their home on stilts for when the river floods its banks.

He doesn’t remember Steve.

A mile away, the quinjet lies where it fell, slowly consumed by the jungle.  Vines, creepers, and moss growing on the sides. It was their home for the first three years.  Now is lays abandoned, consumed with rust. Bleeding red into the land, soaking into the clay. Iron oxide.  Sometimes, in fits of spite, he wishes Stark could see the imperfection of its design.

He slips his shovel into the red earth.

***

He sieves the red clay through a fine mesh when Steve comes out of the house, a bird in his arms.  It nibbles at his hair, but doesn’t seem to have any intention of taking off. Unlike the last bird Steve raised from an egg.

“Have you named it?”  The soldier asks.

“Bits,”  Steve says affectionately, rubbing a knuckle beneath the bird’s purple chin.  It warbles.

“Bits?”  He lifts a brow.  “What are the other’s names?”

“Sam and Nat.”  Steve tickles the bird, and it closes its eyes, crooning.  “I was going to name him Bucky, but I already have a Bucky right here.”  Steve smiles, burying his face in Bits’ feathers.

The soldier huffs, tossing aside the rocks and bugs caught by the mesh.  He dips his hand into the slip, and it coats his arm to the elbow. Smooth.  It’ll dry to a throwable consistency in a week or two.

“Bucky, would you like to hold him?”  Steve asks. The soldier looks to the bird, and it looks back at him.  It’s nothing like a chicken. More like a pheasant, brightly coloured, with long tail feathers.  Its beak seems very sharp.

“No thanks.”

“He’s very nice,”  Steve reassures, as the bird glares at him.  He should have named this one Sam.

“I’m sure he is,”  the soldier says skeptically.

“I’m making a bigger enclosure by the storehouse, could you help me?”

Together, they tie bamboo like reeds into a lattice structure, hammering stakes deep into the ground.  They lay rough hewn boards all along the outside, to keep predators from digging under the fence. In the end, the enclosure is slightly bigger than the store house.  High enough that Steve can step inside without hitting his head on the top. They lay palm fronds over half; shelter from the elements. Scattering freshly cut grass over the bottom.  The soldier picks out one of his shallower dishes, and fills it with rainwater, setting it next to a dish filled with grain.

He wipes sweat from his forehead, scrutinizing the cage.  It seems solid enough. Steve joins him, standing by his side.  He slips his hand into the soldier’s.

“Thank you,”  Steve says, leaning over and kissing him.  He pulls back, blinking. “I’m not going to apologize this time.”

“Okay.”

Steve smiles, and pulls the soldier into a hug, tucking his face against his neck.  The soldier rests a careful hand on Steve’s hip.

“Our old landlady used to keep chickens in the courtyard,”  Steve says, breath ghosting against his skin. “They’d roam behind chicken wire, locked away tight, and she’d collect the eggs to sell.  One day, we were playing stickball, and the ball sailed right into the bushes. You ran in to get it, and when you came out, it was with a broody hen in your arms.  She’d escaped the chicken wire.”

The soldier says nothing, he only squeezes Steve’s hip tighter.

“You told me, ‘Stevie, she’s got an entire clutch back there, a square dozen eggs.’  And in the end, we took three; one for you, one for me, and one for my ma. We boiled them cause we were so scared the landlady would come knocking if she smelled fried eggs.”  He chuckles. “After a lifetime of boiled cabbage and salted fish, those eggs were the best damn things I ever ate. Still are.”

The soldier slides his hand into Steve straw hair, tugging him back.  His eyes are blue like the sky, blue like a rice-straw ash glaze. Steve tilts his head curiously.  “Then there was that time in—”

The soldier pulls him down, and kisses him to shut him up.  Steve makes a noise against his mouth, and hands fist in his shirt.

Steve kisses back.  Not fast. Slow, dirty, so damn good.  His beard is long and soft against the soldier’s face.  His lips are smooth like malleable clay. He’s warm, like the morning stars on his face.  He’s strong, like the tall palms that grow around the clearing. He’s beautiful, like a newly fired plate pulled from the kiln.

He could crumble beneath the soldier’s fingers if he pushed too hard.

The soldier presses him against the side of the storehouse, presses into him, hips to shoulders.  He digs fingers into his hair, grabbing it tight. He bites Steve’s mouth, hard. Steve gasps, a noise that comes from deep inside him.  “Bucky,” he whispers.

“That’s not my name,”  the soldier mutters, kissing him again.

“Bucky?”  Steve gasps, as the soldier tugs down the collar of his shirt, biting at his shoulder.  “Wait, Bucky, stop.” The soldier does. He pulls back. Steve stares at him with wide, teary eyes.

“You could fuck me if you want,”  the soldier offers, running his thumb down his own neck.  Steve’s eyes follow, helplessly. “You could have me. If you want.  Do you want me?”

“I want you, Bucky,”  Steve whispers, anguished.

He shakes his head.  “No. I asked if you wanted me.  Not Bucky.”

Steve closes his eyes, swallows.

He pushes Steve’s hair from his face, caresses the shape of his ear, his jaw.  “Seven years, Steve. Do you want me?”

Steve nods.  “I want you. Godforbid, I do.”

He wraps his hand around Steve’s wrist, and takes him into their house.  He lays him out on the soldier’s bedroll. Tears gather in Steve’s eyes, but the soldier wipes them away, hovering over him.  “You’re crying. For him?”

“I love him,”  he chokes out. “I loved him,”  he corrects.

“Do you love me?”  The soldier asks.

“Course I do,”  he chuckles wetly.  “Hundred years, and I ain’t ever stopped.”

Seven years, and the soldier fell in love halfway through the first.  He kisses Steve, he nudges his chin with his thumb, holding him steady.

“I’m not him, you know,”  he says.

“You’re not the man they made you either,”  Steve says sadly. “You’re you.” Steve runs his hands through the soldier’s hair, pulling at the cord holding it back.  It tumbles down in a waterfall. Steve uses it to tug him closer. He kisses the corner of his mouth, his cheek, the tip of his nose.  His lips.

Later, the soldier sits out on the veranda as rain falls from the heavens, thunder booming far in the distance.  Steve is fast asleep, bare to the elements. Lying on his front, His back moves steadily up and down with every breath he takes.  Light from the smoldering firepit bathes his skin in deep oranges.

The birds chatter in their newly built enclosure, and the soldier goes out to investigate.  He’s soaked to the bone in seconds, clothes sticking to his back. The birds huddle together, nothing but a dark mass, even in the light of the massive moon.

He looks out to the treeline, and a dark shape with glowing eyes stares back.  Frozen, he stands his ground. Two predators, facing each other, waiting for the other to strike.  The soldier pushes his wet hair from his face. Waiting. Watching.

Eventually, it melts back into the jungle, syrupy in its movements, conceding its claim on the clearing.  Only then does he go back inside.

Slipping out of his wet clothes, he slides into the bedroll behind Steve—who mutters something unintelligible, but doesn’t awaken.

He’s not a soldier anymore, is he?  He’s not Bucky Barnes either.

He pushes aside Steve’s hair, and kisses the back of his neck.

He’s a builder.  He’s a potter. He's Steve's best friend.  He's Steve's lover.

He's himself.

***

The potter prepares the kiln.  He loads the biscuit fired pieces inside, stacking and arranging them all along the steps to the chimney so at least fifty fit in the long narrow vault.  He packs bone dry wood into the firebox at the very front, alternating between various grasses. The wood and grass will vapourize, and fly ash will form, settling over the pottery in a natural ash glaze.  Different grasses and woods will turn the pottery different colours. It’s always a surprise, but he crosses his fingers and hopes for blue. He’s never had blue before.

With that prayer, he seals the kiln with thick river mud.

***

The builder improves the bird’s enclosure.  Suffering, as Bits—who should be named Sam—nips at his bare fingers with discrimination.  Bits has taken to following Steve around like a duckling, but barely tolerates his presence.  Even when he refills the food bowl with fresh grain.

With a sigh, he moves on to constructing a more permanent roof for the enclosure.

***

At the river’s edge, the best friend ducks as Steve flings a wad of mud in his direction, laughing like a hyena.  He chases Steve down, and tackles him to the ground. Straddling him, he tickles him until he cries uncle.

Steve, in turn, wraps his arms around his shoulders, and doesn’t let him go.

***

The lover kisses Steve as he hands him more wood to feed the hungry kiln.  It fires for two days and two nights, and rests for a week, allowing the pieces to cool slowly.  The potter cracks open the kiln, but the lover carefully unloads it. Presenting Steve with a plate glazed the colour of his eyes.

***

“I love you,”  Steve says, as they watch the twin stars set, together on the veranda.

He slips his hand into Steve’s and closes his eyes.  Seven years, and a lifetime to come.


End file.
